


Join Us In Our Blind Ambition

by blackorchids



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Abrupt Ending, Character Study, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Family Issues, Fiona Goes To Jail, Gen, Good Sibling Lip Gallagher, Growing Up, Lip Gallagher & Mickey Milkovich Friendship, Mickey Milkovich Loves Ian Gallagher, Older Sibling Fiona Gallagher, POV Lip Gallagher, Post-Season/Series 04, Untreated Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 08:58:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18385199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: When Fiona gets carted off downstate, the family becomes Lip's responsibility. It's harder than he thought it'd be.





	Join Us In Our Blind Ambition

**Author's Note:**

> sort of a character study, i guess? title from styx's _grand illusion_. weirdly, that whole song seems to fit any and every potential character study i could do in this fandom

Fiona gets ninety days and Lip submits the request to take his finals a few weeks early, so he can get home in time for them to cart her off and still leave the minors in their family with an adult. One of his professors denies him the opportunity and the idea of retaking the class is bitter in his throat and it only helps to increase how completely _pissed_ he is at Fiona.

The kiddies cry, Debbie loud and Carl privately, visibly gritting his teeth. Ian looks almost as bad as he did when Mickey got hitched, but Lip doesn’t have the patience to deal with Ian and his huge emotions, so, instead, he hustles the rest of them back into the house, mumbling about the temperature and their state of dress.

Carl and Deb have a week left of school, and they’ve missed enough that they won’t get away with taking the rest of it off, so Lip and Ian have to lurk around Liam’s hospital room on their own, a giant-ass cloud of suck following them, like it has been for their entire lives, basically.

The house is freezing when they get home, and Lip sees the calendar of due-dates, notices the third-notice of the gas bill, taped right next to a second-notice water bill. He can almost perfectly picture the third-notice water bill sitting in their overstuffed mailbox, and he swallows hard, plugs in their sketch microwave and starts warming up plates of chicken nuggets.

Carl complains about the plastic taste and Debbie bitches about the fact that they don’t have any ketchup and Ian stands at the foot of the stairs and stares at them all blankly for a little while before he turns and does his dead-man’s march back up the stairs.

After Lip kicks Debbie’s ass about whether or not she’s allowed to go out and see Matty—no—and literally physically wrestles Carl into Ian’s old bed—still easy—he leaves Ian to his own devices in Lip’s old room and goes to sit with his head in his hands on the couch, bills sprawled out in front of him, s quirrel fund jar contents separated into a handful of neat piles.

Lip makes it through the last week of school before winter break by the skin of his teeth, throat feeling a little fuzzy after spending so much of it straight _yelling_ at the two demons who share his kid siblings’ faces. Ian doesn’t visit Liam after that first day, spends his nights doing god knows what and his days acting like he can’t read the blatant dismay on Mickey’s face.

The first day of winter break starts with Debbie trying to leave the house in one of Fiona’s party dresses at nine in the morning, and ends with Carl coming home with double-shiners and a split lip, and that sets the tone for the next two weeks.

Liam gets discharged a few days after Christmas, though, and most of the Gallaghers get their shit together long enough to welcome him home, arms full of pamphlets and print-out sheets of information about what to look for and what to expect in terms of potential developmental delays. They have leftover Christmas ham and a brand new cake that Sheila brought over, and Ian smiles without the unnerving undertone of mania and Liam laughs a lot and smiles a lot and doesn’t say a single word.

Getting the kiddies ready for school the Tuesday after New Years’ isn’t the easiest thing he’s ever done, but he manages it, and he even thinks they won’t be late. Unfortunately, he’s going to be late, so he books it to the L station, half a stale bagel in his hand and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. 

Manny is not thrilled with him for being forty minutes late to his first work study shift of the semester, but the man has always been kind under his gruff exterior, so he settles for glaring across the kitchen but lets Lip tie on his apron and get to work. Going to four classes after work is annoying but fine, since it’s the first day and three of his professors are just boredly going over the syllabus.

His microeconomics professor expected them all to have read the first three chapters and Lip is apparently the only one who hadn’t, so of course he gets called on twice in the course’s ninety-minute session, and when he gets out of the building, it’s pitch black even though it’s only a little past six, and he just wants to go sleep for the next twelve hours in his creaky dorm bed.

But he has to take the L train home, and the house is frustratingly dark, no sign of any of the three kids or Ian, so he calls Sheila, who tells him that Debbie had told her she could keep Liam over night, and he calls Ian, who doesn’t pick up, and he calls Mickey, who does, just to bitch and moan at him about next to nothing.

Carl gets home late enough that Lip is falling asleep over his microeconomics textbook, a pot of cold spaghetti sitting next to him, and he smells like he’s been smoking something stronger than weed, but Lip’s just grateful he’s home. Debbie never turns up.

A month passes in the same vein, and Fiona’s sentence is nearly half over, and Lip is failing all of his classes bar intro to mechanics, and he hasn’t even thought about wasting one of his two precious weekend days to make the trip downstate to visit his sister. He knows Mickey’s taken Liam and Debbie a couple times, thinks Carl’s been down once, but he can barely remember the last time any of them had been all together in the house for more than a few minutes at a time, except, _possibly_ , to sleep. Ian’s god knows where most of the time, gone for days in a row and back without an explanation or an excuse, and Lip’s struggling to make his meager allowance stretch to cover all of the bills he has. 

He thinks about the logistics of running a scam, tries to imagine ditching work study and a full day of classes to trick upper-middles out of their pocket change, tries to estimate how much he might be able to pull in a single day. Stares at the electricity bill and the dwindling squirrel fund and Liam’s hospital costs and listens to Carl and Debbie _screaming_ at each other upstairs.

Debbie needs birth control if she’s going to insist on continuing to see that creepy old guy who brings her home after midnight most days, and if Fiona’s not working at the cup factory, Fiona’s benefits aren’t going to get them anywhere.

Lip’s phone rings, and when he answers, it’s Mrs. Shelly, from the junior high, and she launches straight into a summary of things as she knows them: Carl’s truancy records are going to lead to a police visit soon, and he’s failing three classes, which means he’ll be held back again if he doesn’t get his shit together.

“Can I speak to the guardian in charge?” she asks and Lip wants to scream or hang up or both.

“She’s indisposed, but I’m next in line,” He tells her in the respectable voice he’s learned in college. “I’ll speak to Carl and find him a tutor.”

Mickey comes barging in a little after Lip hangs up and leans forward to smack his head against the sticky coffee table. He’s got his kid on his hip and Liam’s hand clutched in his free hand. Liam’s holding a loaf of bread and Mickey’s got a sack of groceries hanging from his wrist, carefully not jostling the baby, and Lip just stares at him in bemusement, unable to wipe the dismay from his face.

“Not so easy being Mr. Mom, is it?” Mickey says from the kitchen, where he sets up the baby with some cheerios and Liam with a coloring page and a few broken crayons. Lip might be having a stroke.

“It’s not like Fiona ever had it all together,” Lip says sourly, when the implication hits him.

Mickey comes to stand in the doorway, disbelieving look on his face.

“Ay, man, you’re such a fuckin’ bitch,” he says, which must make sense to him.

“Fuck you,” Lip says, getting up from the couch and ignoring how his knees crack. Debbie storms down the back stairs, too much eyeshadow on her face and one of Mandy’s skanky dresses on her body and Lip really might lose it.

“Make sure you get a good price on that street corner you’re goin’ to,” Mickey says to her before she reaches the door, and Lip punches him on the arm, but Debbie turns around, scoffing at him.

“I’m gonna see Matty,” she tells them. Or, well, she tells _Mickey_ , because the twilight zone really has begun.

“Yeah, those geriatric pervs _love_ sequins,” Mickey tells her. “Good choice.” He doesn’t even sound like he’s lying, and, abruptly, Lip is forced to remember what Ian does for a living now. Debbie scoffs again, but turns back up the stairs, hopefully to change.

“Firecrotch’s been working for years,” Mickey continues to Lip, like he’s unaware that he’s melting Lip’s brain. “The little girl does the daycare. The big one takes any job she can get. What’ve _you_ done ‘sides sell drugs to kids on summer break?”

“Seems to me,” Mickey says later, after dinner where Carl grilled him about different types of ammo and Yev babbled more than Liam, “That you mighta been underestimating how much bullshit you Gallagher harpies put your sister through.”

Lip’s staring at his textbooks and Mickey’s washing dishes, and he has the sinking feeling that he’s going to have to ask for a deferment of classes, because even when Fiona gets out, it’s not like she’s gonna be able to find another job straight away with this new felony charge after her name.

Ian comes crashing in then, pupils blown, hair a disaster, wearing nothing but his horrible tiny shorts and a jacket that’s too short in the wrists, and he grins at them both, next to no recognition in his eyes, passes by Mickey to grab a bottle of gin from the freezer.

“Party a few blocks over at Johanssen’s,” he says, too loud, too _everything_. He slaps Mickey on the ass and Lip doesn’t know who’s more shocked, himself or Mickey. “You up for it?”

Mickey looks at his half-done dishes, tired enough that even Lip can tell, before he visibly swallows and grins up at Ian. “The fuck you talkin’ to? ‘Course I’m up for it.”

Lip’s still studying when Mickey gets back in, sans Ian, fumbling the lock and bumping into the chair, but ultimately doing a fairly good job of pretending he’s not completely hammered.

“Easy to be the superhero once a month,” Mickey says, slurring his s-noises but somehow able to continue their not-conversation from six hours earlier. “Let your sister deal with the e’ryday shit ‘nd come swooping,” here, he makes a gesture with his hands, “in t’save the day when she fucks up.”

“You don’t know shit about my family,” Lip says, angry and frustrated about it. Mickey laughs at him, mean and smug and everything Lip’s always disliked, and Lip can’t even wrap his head around the fact that he and Mickey have been co-parenting this disaster of a family since Fiona went in. Tastes the truth of it bitter in his throat—that he’d have already failed if Mickey wasn’t here helping him out in his own strangely effective way.

Fiona always did the big picture stuff, letting Lip handle the future-planning and letting Ian do the interpersonal problems, and the _three_ of them had struggled but made it work. But he’s starting to realize, pit permanently at home in his stomach, that Fi and Ian had done a helluva lot more in the everyday category than he’d thought, just so he could keep his grades up and get into college.

“Takes a village, and all that crap,” Mickey says, checking on Yevgeny, asleep in his little port-a-crib, before stumbling up the stairs.

Lip closes his eyes for a second and wakes up six hours later to Debbie loudly asking where her lunch is.

“Give me a sec,” he says to her, a little short, and presses the heels of his palms to his eyes before getting up and starting the day.

She rolls her eyes at him when he makes a shitty peanut-butter sandwich and stuffs a banana and a can of pop in the bag, but accepts the thing and is out the door in a red-haired whirl, cloud of Fiona’s baby prostitute body spray lingering behind her.

He takes Carl to school personally, visits the guidance counselor to find out which classes he’s failing and receives a packet of grade-revival work from Carl’s biology teacher, and then he goes over to the CVS on the corner to fill out a job application.

That night, he submits his request to defer his classes. The next morning, he goes to visit his sister.

**Author's Note:**

> this is not meant to bash any of the characters??? i've just always felt like, while lip being angry was valid, he really never gave fi the benefit of the doubt and it never seemed like anyone really _understood_ how hard fiona actually worked to keep the family running imo
> 
> come argue about it on my [tumblr](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
